Let Him Go

Let Him Go doesn’t reinvent the wheel. It is a genre thriller, where the good guys face impossible odds against cartoonish bad guys. But it plays out with style, violence that doesn’t strain credulity, and a consequence for every action taken.

Let Him Go is a tense genre piece that finds room to build out its characters, and their flaws, between bursts of action and suspense; it’s a tricky combination, but Bezucha manages the balance with real skill.

Great as our actual dads might be, they simply cannot compete with Costner. The guy perfectly hits all the right notes: honesty, dignity, quiet reserve, rugged Americana – all qualities we want in a hyperbolic father figure. Let Him Go exploits all this and reminds us of one other thing he’s good at: ass-kicking. But Let Him Go isn’t really Costner’s movie. Instead, it belongs to Diane Lane as his wife.

The film’s gear change between mournfulness and madness is stuck in idle.

The pace is deadly slow, the style old-fashioned and the acting devoid of spontaneity. These are skilled actors, but the writing is so threadbare — an important character from the novel has been eliminated — and the direction (by Thomas Bezucha, working from his own adaptation) is so lacking in nuance that genuine dramatic energy gets lost by the wayside during the road trip to North Dakota.